Yahoo Lifestyle Who Are the Models Behind Columbia Pictures’ Lady Liberty Logo?
Rita Hayworth, Lucille Ball, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts are some of the powerful names who have starred in Columbia Pictures movies since the studio was founded in 1918. Stars from different generations, they all had one common costar onscreen: Lady Liberty, also known as the “Torch Lady” featured in the Columbia Pictures logo.
Lady Liberty debuted on the big screen in 1924, following a decision by Columbia Pictures’ founders, brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and business partner Joe Brandt, to change the name of the company from Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales Corporation to what’s called today. Both the name and the logo were inspired by Lady Columbia (or Miss Columbia), considered a female personification of the United States.
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Columbia, derived from Christopher Columbus and inspired by the British Britannia, was often used in the 1700s to refer to the Thirteen Colonies that would form the United States. She was later represented in cartoons, coins and statues as a goddess-like figure, often wearing draped garments. When the Cohn brothers and Brandt created Columbia Pictures’ first logo, they used an image of a Roman warrior to pay homage to the historical American figure.
In the first logo, Lady Liberty was seen carrying a shield and what it looks like a laurel wreath sword. Only in 1928, the logo was updated to feature the muse carrying a torch, an image that has been updated many times by the studio over the years and it became its onscreen signature. The most famous updates are the 1936 Lady Liberty, which was used until 1976, and the 1992 version, which is used until today.
Throughout the decades, many actresses and models have claimed to be the ones who inspired or even modeled for the photographers and artists responsible for creating the logo. Still, only a handful were able to provide enough evidence to sustain their Lady Liberty claims.
Columbia Pictures’ 1936-1976 Lady Liberty model
Evelyn Venable, wife of cinematographer Hal Mohr and famous for voicing and modeling for the Blue Fairy in Walt Disney’s 1940 “Pinocchio,” is one of the notable names in the list. An alumna from the University of Cincinnati, Venable was one of the models who posed for a photo shoot at the Columbia Pictures studios in Hollywood, Calif., for the 1936 logo update. Venable was reportedly paid $25 for her work and never signed an image license with the studios.
“My mother said that she never was asked, nor gave, permission to Columbia. Of course, in that era, the studios did pretty much what they wanted,” Venable’s daughter Rosalia Mohr Woodson once told the University of Cincinnati magazine. Woodson also added that, although her mom’s claims regarding being the Lady Liberty chosen by Columbia Pictures for its logo, the family was never able to confirm the information. “In recent years we have attempted to get info from the studio, but all we got was ‘no comment’ or ‘we don’t know.’ As far as I’m concerned, that’s her,” Woodson said. Venable died in 1993 at age 80.
Amelia Batchelor, known for playing Ozmite in 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz,” also claimed to have been the model featured in the 1936 “Torch Lady” creation.
“I think, in 1935 or 1936. I was a stock contract player, and for $75 a week we did everything but sweep the floor. We posed for this and that and did bit parts, sometimes in two or three pictures a day. Jobs were very hard to get, and $75 was a lot of money then, when you could buy a loaf of bread for 10 cents. Anyway, I didn’t mind posing. I’d won a beauty contest in Dallas, and my one and only ambition was to be discovered,” Batchelor told People in 1987.
Bette Davis threw another name in the ring in her 1962 “The Lonely Life” autobiography, claiming Columbia Pictures used the image of showgirl Claudia Dell for the logo without her knowledge. “Little Claudia Dell, whose image was used as Columbia Pictures signature for years, later used it as another kind of jumping-off point. She plunged in despair to her death from the first letter of the very word that crushed her.” Years later, Davis admitted she fabricated the story and had never actually met Dell.
In 1986, The Chicago Daily News interviewed Jane Bartholomew, who also claimed to have posed as the model for Lady Liberty in the 1940s. According to the publication, Bartholomew contacted Columbia Pictures for confirmation in 1975 and was sent three copies of her photo shoot.
Columbia Pictures’ 1992 Lady Liberty
From 1976 to 1981, Columbia Pictures retired Lady Liberty from the screen. The logo was later rescued in 1982 after The Coca-Cola Company purchased the studios. In 1989, Coca-Cola sold Columbia Pictures to Tri-Star Pictures, which later sold the company to Sony in 1989.
In 1992, Columbia Pictures introduced a new logo created by New Orleans artist Michael Deas, known for painting 25 stamps for the U.S. Postal Service, including stamps for Tennessee Williams (1995), Marilyn Monroe (1995), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1996), George H. W. Bush (2019) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2023).
Deas reportedly interviewed different models to help him create the 1992 Columbia Pictures logo but ended up choosing Jenny Joseph to be his muse. She had no experience working as a model or acting.
Joseph posed for the lens of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Kathy Anderson in 1992, wearing a draped white dress, a blue fabric falling down her left shoulder and raising a lamp with her right arm.
“They wrapped a sheet around me and I held a regular little desk lamp, a side lamp,” Joseph told 4WWL in 2012. “I just held that up and we did that with a light bulb.”
Deas then used the images as inspiration to paint the 1992 version of the studio’s logo, which is still used today.
In 2023, Columbia Pictures released a new version of the logo featuring Joseph as its model, with an enhanced glow coming from the torch, to celebrate the studio’s 100th anniversary.
“There is one thing that separates a major studio from all other content producers: history. At Columbia, that history is reflected in the countless cultural talismans created by thousands of people over now 100 years. All of us at Columbia are proud of that legacy and honored to celebrate it,” Tom Rothman, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures’ Motion Picture Group, said in a statement following the logo reveal in 2023.
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